


An Approximate Rescue

by sophiagratia



Category: West Wing
Genre: Amicable Breakup, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Lovers to Friends, Romantic Friendship, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 04:00:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/617851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is more than one way to have a happy-ending romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Approximate Rescue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unfertig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfertig/gifts).



Later, you’ll think of it as the night the President walked proudly into censure, and not as the night you first slept with Toby Ziegler.

But first it’s just a late night on your office couch in comfortable companionship with your friend, and that’s the thing you will remember.

And just now, you’re preoccupied with how completely Josh freaked you out, with that thing about ‘if you were on the inside’ – freaked you out big time, because for once it’s not showboating, for once it’s not Josh the power-playing boy with the ego, it’s Josh who forgets about himself because someone he loves is in danger, the Josh you love, the Josh you’d fight for with your bare hands. 

‘Josh scared the shit out of me,’ you say aloud. You’re sprawled on the couch with a stack of memos on your lap, your legs stretched out across Toby’s, very late at night, and you don’t yet know what has happened an hour ago in the Oval Office. You’re waiting for your phone to ring and the only thing that makes it bearable is the quiet companionship of your old friend. 

‘Don’t be scared,’ he says, but it’s rote and if he was thinking about who he was talking to he wouldn’t say it. 

‘Everything scares the shit out of me, these days,’ you say, and it’s not hard because it’s him, and anyway he’s only half-listening. It’s remarkable, in these moments. That you’ve become so comfortable with each other that you can spend late nights like this, your legs draped across him on your couch where he sits composing in his head, his fingers drumming absently on your shins. 

He glances at you, half-attentive, still composing. You can tell because his mouth is moving in that way he has, that odd fish-like way. 

You sigh and stretch and you look at Gail, who’s also doing it, but she _is_ a fish, so – 

‘It’s late,’ you say, to spare yourself. You wonder when and how you decided to gender Gail female. ‘It’s _really_ late.’

He looks at you and says, ‘It’s one a.m.,’ as though that’s a counterargument. But maybe he’s thinking about you, too, what you’ve said, wondering if it’s true, how scared you are.

You look at your phone, which continues not to ring, and sigh. ‘Do you ever.’ 

He tips the last of his beer back and futzes with the bottle and then looks at you. You have all his attention now; you can feel it. You need him; there he is; it’s immediate. How does he know to do that? 

‘Do you.’ You sigh again. The heel of your hand hurts, in a good way, against your forehead. ‘Get sick of worrying? Not worry about – whatever – _politics_ , how it’ll play, how it’ll poll, whatever, but worrying about, you know, us, _people_ , stuff you’re supposed to worry about?’ 

He makes the fish face again. He’s looking at you, his jaw working, and you have all his attention. 

‘Leo?’ he says. He passes his empty bottle from one hand to the other. 

‘Yeah.’ 

‘Yeah, I’m sick of it. I’ve been sick of it for –’ That little cynical laugh of his; that gesture. But his eyes return to you. 

‘Doesn’t it piss you off?’ Your anger flushes you, suddenly, and your voice is louder than you meant it to be. 

‘Yeah,’ he says. He laughs again; he gives the label on the bottle a vindictive little pull. ‘ _Yeah_ , CJ, _yeah_ , it pisses me off, what, you think it’s – it would be – how could I, anyone, watch a man of the caliber of Leo McGarry, watch a _giant_ of American politics be subjected to this petty fucking self-aggrandizing ideological smokescreen of a campaign ploy perpetrated by half a dozen of the Republican party’s most fucking legally illiterate fucking morally bankrupt _bottom-feeders_ and be even _remotely_ okay with it? You bet it pisses me off, it – yeah, it pisses me off, CJ.’ The label’s in shreds.

‘… How long you been waiting to let that out, Tobus?’ He lets you smirk at him; he smirks back and it’s almost like a smile. 

‘Yeah.’

‘I mean – what I mean is, doesn’t it piss you off to feel, I don’t know, helpless?’ You’re not helpless, strictly. You don’t know where you and he rank on the list of the nation’s most powerful, but you’re up there. But then your friends suffer. And you cannot rescue them from that any more than they can rescue you. 

He doesn’t need to be told. ‘Yeah.’ 

‘What do you think it is? The thing. Leo’s thing.’ 

‘I think if it were something we needed to know we would know.’ 

‘You don’t think it’s about the President.’

‘No.’

‘I think it’s about character assassination.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Fucking morally bankrupt fucking bottom feeders.’ 

He smiles at you. (He smiles. At you.) ‘See?’

‘Yeah.’ Has it always had that effect, him smiling at you? Yes, of course it has. It’s no rescue but it’s a nice approximation. You look at your phone. You stand up, you gather your things, you put on your coat. What else is there to do. ‘It’s really late.’

‘Yeah.’

He doesn’t move to leave. Is he going to, what, spend the night on the couch in your office, muttering to himself, building oratorical castles in his head? 

‘Toby?’ 

‘Yeah,’ like he’s coming out of a dream. He stands up, then he remembers the bottle and the paper and doubles back and shuffles out with you, but ‘Hey,’ he says, pausing in the threshold. 

‘Yeah?’

‘I, uh.’ He looks away from you. ‘I worry about you, too.’ He looks at the floor, the ceiling, anywhere but at you. ‘I mean, not because.’ 

‘Toby, I…’ You don’t know what to say. You could just say that. You’re about to stumble over yourself but he prevents you.

‘No, I mean, not because – you’re really, really good at what you do. I don’t think people tell you that enough. I don’t tell you that enough.’ He spreads his arms. ‘Never mind. Good night, CJ.’ 

You stop him with a hand on his shoulder. You decide to wait to be moved by what he’s just said. ‘Toby, what?’ 

‘I don’t think this job gives us enough room to care for each other,’ he says. It sounds like he’s been waiting even longer to let that out. And the cynicism just drops from him, and he’s the Toby almost nobody knows, Toby before someone took the stars out of his eyes. And he knows it, because he smirks again like he’s making fun of himself. ‘And I think we should make room, more.’ He gives that little laugh again.

‘Yeah,’ you say. Because he’s right and what else do you say.

He shifts and looks around again and finally at you. ‘So, okay. I care for you, Claudia Jean. Tremendously.’ He’s trying for wry but he can’t help it: he means it. And you don’t know what to say. 

So you kiss him. It’s occurred to you before and it occurs to you now and what makes now different from before is that you do it. One two three: thought, kiss, then it’s over. But it’s not, because his arms wrap around you and the bottle digs into your back and he’s kissing you, too. 

‘I don’t want you to worry about me,’ you say, when you have a chance to take a breath. 

He threads his fingers through your hair – and it’s awkward, because he’s also holding a beer bottle, and you laugh – and he lays his cheek against yours and laughs a little and says, ‘Okay.’ 

Later, it will occur to you how many other ways that moment could have gone and you’ll almost (almost) wish you’d played it differently, but you don’t know that yet and so now what you do is take his hand and lead him down the quiet hall, walking backward so you can smile at him, your lopsided, gap-toothed smile you’re so confident in, and you say, ‘I think you should stop worrying and come home with me, Tobias Ziegler.’ Because you want to stop worrying, too, and right now, he is how you can do that.

He smiles and laughs and lets you tug him along and says, ‘Okay.’

*

She’s sitting far away from you, perched on the arm of a chair as if to say that she’s only here so long as she needs to be before she’ll be up and flying, doing what she does in the service of – whatever. Whatever is about to happen. She’s sitting far away from you as if to make it clear that no one here will know; no one here is to know. She has created this distance as a counterbalance to last night’s extreme proximity. 

Okay. You take her cue and sit quietly and you try not to look at her.

She takes the news as you do; quietly and only asking what her next job is. She told you she was scared, so you know that she’s as scared as you are. That’s some consolation, that you and she share your fears. 

And while this is happening, while everyone is stunned and silent, you know you need to be in the game but instead you’re looking very intently anywhere but at her legs because you are thinking about what her long shins were like under your lips and about the little unexpected freckles on her thighs that are covered now by her stockings and her skirt but were bare under your lips just a few hours ago. 

She was panting your name, a few hours ago, in a voice you’d never heard her use. And now she is so poised, so capable, so composed for disaster. You find – and this is right, it’s right that this should be so and you would have guessed it before if it had occurred to you to guess – you find that it is not at all difficult to reconcile the one with the other, that sweat and sound and naked movement with this capable composure. (This is what you will remember, above all this.)

She looks at you before she leaves the room. You’ll need each other; you always have and you will again today. You’ve found a new way, just these past hours, to need and to fulfill. That is what will get you through today, today and whatever comes next. 

*

You wake up in the morning with his hand on your hip and it makes disaster seem easier to bear. You think sometimes in the middle of the day of his beard against your neck and you have to shake yourself out before you can go on with what you were doing.

*

You’re starting to make your staff uncomfortable, because sometimes you make soft-spoken requests and sometimes you smile at them. You manage, somehow, not to touch her in meetings, in the hallways, not to have your hands constantly on her. 

*

Disaster after disaster after disaster, and he is there for all of them as he has been for so long.

But sometimes, there are victories. Sometimes, you win so big and you don’t know who to kiss first. Joey Lucas. Carol. Sam. Every goddamned reporter in the press room. (And you know, Chris smiles at you sometimes and you think maybe she… and tonight, you know, you _would_.) You’re grinning-giddy and you haven’t had a thing to drink and it’s contagious and you think _what a job_ , your giddiness will be plastered all over four networks and three cable stations and it’ll seep into the wires and infect the whole country, _what a job_ , you and your glee will set the tone for a day and that’s what victory is and what power is and that’s why you do this: your boss gave a speech and the country loves him for it and so do you and you have a crazy vision of three hundred million people all laughing together, and you’re not the only one who’s delusional tonight.

It’s half a riot in the bullpen when you get back and he tugs you into a dance with him and he’s laughing, _laughing_ , aloud, in front of all these people, him! And then you know for sure what you want to do. 

You pull him into your office and slam the door. (You hear the outer door discreetly close and lock and _Bless you, Carol_ , you think, and remind yourself to check the rules on gifts for employees.) You shove him into your desk chair as you kick off your shoes, and you pull off your stockings and hike up your skirt and fall against him and he just says, ‘Oh, god,’ and that’s that.

Congratulations, Claudia Jean, you think to yourself as you start up your car and the clock turns three-thirty sharp. You just had sex in the White House.

*

He describes you to yourself. He lavishes you with rhetoric. In a ballroom he places his hand exactly where it should be under your shoulderblade on your bare skin and he leans into you as you dance – and you’ve both been drinking so hard it’s a wonder you can even stand but somehow you move together through the room and that’s an apt account of this entire strange adventure; you’ve always moved so well together – and he speaks into your ear. You come into fullness in his description of you.

She pulls language from you in long reels and she stuns you to silence. That has always been true of you and her, she’s always been your best, most honest interlocutor; now there are new things to say and to be stunned by. You tell her about her body and the beauty of her voice and what she looks like behind a podium and across a ballroom and you keep talking until it makes her shiver and then when you run out of things to say you run your fingertips the length of her spine and then again and thank god, you think, for backless ballgowns.

*

You’ve been drinking and it’s late and you’re not sure you can – her hand is wrapped around you and she knows what she’s doing; she’s naked against you and kissing your neck and nibbling your ear and making those sounds she makes that drive you crazy and all the same you’re barely half-hard in her hand and you don’t think you can. You pull away and you try not to blush but you do, of course you do.

‘I don’t think I can –’ and you stop, you’re so embarrassed, it’s so awful to speak your embarrassment. But she just palms your cheek and thumbs your cock and kisses you.

‘Does it matter?’

‘…What?’

‘Does it matter? I mean –’ and a twist of her wrist for emphasis ‘– does this still feel good?’ You didn’t think you could blush more than you were. 

‘Yeah.’ 

‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘Exactly,’ she says, and her hands are so gifted, good god, her hands. ‘So what? If it feels good, so what?’ All you can do is kiss her. She smiles against your lips and says, ‘And if I used my mouth? Would that feel good?’

‘Oh, god,’ you say, and she takes that for the yes that it is.

And it’s different, when there’s no end goal in sight, no road map, no urgency or imperative, when it’s just you and her in this bed, it’s just close, it’s just intimate, just your hand in her hair and the splay of her palm on your chest and the slow, careful movement of her mouth.

‘Claudia,’ you say, and you hope that she hears everything else that that means.

She whimpers around your cock and runs her hand the length of your body and then hers, her wrist twisting between her legs and you groan and say, ‘Hey,’ stroking her hair, and ‘C’mere,’ and she does, kissing her way up your torso to your mouth and, ‘Let me,’ you say against her teeth. It’s a plea, but she takes it as an offer and she’s wet against your thigh; you groan again. She’s wet under your fingers and she moves; she moves; she moves; you watch and feel her move and your fingers slip inside and ‘Oh, _god_ ,’ you say, your other hand pressed against her sternum, and when she shouts your name and comes and slumps against you you’re on the point of tears because you’ve never in your life felt this close to anyone, ever.

*

One by one they sniff it out, the others, and as with everything they see no reason to keep quiet about it.

Donna: ‘Nice. Really, good for you, CJ.’ You think she’s mocking you, but she’s not. ‘Because about a million men in this city will shout up and down that what they want is a strong independent woman of intellect and ambition, and Toby Ziegler is one of the approximately five who mean it.’ She nods her approval at you and shapes up her sheaf of papers and goes off to shout at her boss whom she knows not to be one of the five and you think: wow. Donna Moss.

Then Abbey: ‘He gonna make an honest woman of you?’ She has a way of making the most banal clichés so wonderfully lewd. She winks and cocks an eyebrow like she knows and you think, you know what, maybe she does. You smile and tell her that he already has, that he always has.

Hence Sam, stupid and gleeful and sweet and beautiful about it: ‘Oh, CJ. CJ! You’ll be so great together. You’ve always been great together. CJ!’ He kisses your cheek and just beams. And he’s right. You have always been great together.

And Josh, playing cynical but smiling: ‘Yeah, I like it when you two are sniping at each other, ’cause it makes you so much nicer to everybody else.’ He’s right, too.

They’re all right. But your friends, with the weight of their expectations, don’t know how right they are.

And that’s when you finally decide, when it hits you, what you should have known long ago, and your heart drops into your stomach and you finally decide. It’s him, he’s your best self, and you have to do something about it.

*

Your morning is a terrifying hell and you need something else in your day, something real and worthwhile and strong. 

You drag him out of the office to take a walk with you through an afternoon cliché. The air along the river is sweet and just poised on that delicate brink between rough winter wind and the softness of summer, and the cherry trees are in full bloom and the Jefferson Memorial is a picture-postcard in the sun.

He looks around and slips his arm around your waist and takes his other hand out of his pocket. 

You laugh. ‘Are you trying to be protective?’

‘Yeah. Weird, isn’t it?’ 

‘Yeah. Listen, I really need you not to worry about me now.’

‘CJ, you’re getting death threats that have _Ron Butterfield’s_ panties in a twist, how could I not – ’

‘Because I’m scared, Toby, I’m scared, and if you’re worried that means I’m right to be scared and then I’m more scared and I really need to not be. You want to protect me? Believe for me that I’m already safe.’ 

‘Yeah, but, um.’ He strokes his beard and looks at you warily. ‘Is it still okay that I bought you a crossbow for your birthday?’

‘Yes, that’s very thoughtful. Sweet, even.’ You can keep a straight face because it _is_ sweet, how quickly he steps into your tempo, without question. 

‘And,’ he says after a moment, ‘a catsuit to wear when you shoot it. That might have crossed a line, maybe. The catsuit.’ 

You crack up completely, and he squeezes your waist and smiles like he’s pleased with himself and with you and to be walking along the river in the sweet afternoon air with you, and this, you think, this and no more than this is what you want. For the first time in two days you’re not looking over your shoulder, you don’t care about the possible guy with the camera or the gun, because Toby Ziegler sort of thinks you’re a superhero and likes to make you laugh. 

You can’t wait any longer, can’t let this go on, so you sit him down on a bench and just start in against the lump in your throat. ‘Toby, I love you and I want to know you for the rest of my life. I want us each to be the other’s best self for the rest of our lives.’ That happened a little faster than you expected, but there it is. You watch his mind try to catch up.

‘Uh,’ he says. He laughs, a little. That cynical little laugh you love. ‘CJ, are you – asking me to _marry_ you?’

You smile at him, you almost burst out laughing it’s so wonderful and absurd and you’re so high on adrenaline and nerves but you don’t; you edge a little closer to him and you look out at the river and you say: 

‘No! I’m breaking up with you!’ And it’s such a relief then that you do laugh, until you look back at him and he looks like you slapped him.

‘Oh, Toby, no, I mean – I mean. Not breaking up with you, exactly. But the sex and the sleepovers and the sweet-nothings, all that, I’ve loved it and it’s been wonderful – every moment has been wonderful, and I’ve felt things and learned things that I never could have any other way and I’m so grateful to you for that, Toby.’ And you’re tearing up a little because it hits you suddenly that you _are_ going to miss it, that you’re not going to kiss him again and he’s not going to touch you like that again, and it plays like a reel in your mind, his mouth on your ribcage, his hips against the inside of your thighs, the way he smells in the morning. He’s not going to whisper the description of you into your ear while his fingertips on your back seduce you in public, ever again. It hurts and you can’t kiss him, now or ever again. 

You take a deep breath and lay both hands on his arm. ‘I’ve loved it and I’m going to miss it. But it’s not what I want with you, and I don’t want us to do that anymore.’ 

He’s silent. Looking out over the river, silent, his mouth working in that fishlike way. Stupidly, a single perfect pink petal falls on his head. You reach to brush it off; your hand lingers on his hair, then on his shoulder; then he shrugs you off.

It hurts to hurt him. And you hear the echoes of Donna’s voice and Abbey’s and Sam’s and Josh’s and you feel the weight of your friends’ expectations press down on you. But you persist; you have to.

‘Toby… Toby, you are the finest friend I have ever had. You and I are better together than either of us will ever be alone. We fulfill each other and we keep each other honest and when we need to we yell at each other – have you noticed that we have not had one single fight since this started? We’ve been _nice_ to each other for five months, Toby. You and I are not nice people. And we’re better when we’re roughing each other up a bit. We’re better when we’re friends.’ You’re getting frantic, you can hear it in your voice and feel it in your throat so you stop talking and you look at him and grip his arm. You have to make him see, but how can you?

‘Okay,’ he says. Sullen and injured, he sits there and works his jaw and doesn’t look at you. ‘Okay,’ he says again, and that’s it. He stands up and walks away. Your hands fall empty into your lap and you stare at them for a moment and then at him, already receding.

‘Damn it, Toby!’ you call after him, your voice strained and now you’re crying in earnest because what if this is _it_ , what if it’s all over and your best self is walking away for real and true and forever? He turns and holds up a hand and shakes his head. 

‘No, CJ,’ he says, ‘don’t you dare.’ And he’s so angry and so injured and he turns on his heel and keeps walking.

*

At least you’ve learned to recognize your own self-indulgence. For days and then weeks you scarcely speak to her except when you have to and you know, at least, that this has a name and it’s self-indulgence. You spend days and then weeks trying to think your way out of it.

What’s funny is that the reel that plays in your mind isn’t what you expect it to be, what you sometimes force it to be. You expected to be thinking constantly of her skin sun-dappled in the morning or the taste of her lips or her weight in your arms but that’s not where your mind goes, not where you dwell. You dwell on her voice, you dwell on the whipcrack of her intelligence, you hear her over and over saying that you are each the other’s best self. 

You’re not thinking of CJ your lover, you’re thinking of CJ who can fall into her own pool and throw a basketball through a window and also command the discourse of an entire nation, CJ who can torment you with the worst inevitable pun and two minutes later turn you around on what you’d thought was a hard-hewn point of your deepest-held philosophy. Smart, self-possessed, graceless, generous, uncompromising Claudia Jean Cregg who has always been your best and most honest interlocutor. 

You hear her saying that she _learned_ from all that closeness, all that so proximate intimacy. You know you have, too. You know you are closer to her than you were before, or you could be if you got over yourself. You wonder how to keep and hold that and still let go of the things you wish you were thinking of, her skin and the smell of her.

You’re pacing in Margaret’s office and she’s glaring at you; she doesn’t like when you pace – she doesn’t really like _you_ – and anyway everyone knows something’s up and everyone has taken CJ’s side and you think: sure, yes, that makes sense. You recognize it as self-indulgence and you try to smile at Margaret and that makes her suspicious.

Leo calls you in at last, and you would be relieved but then you remember why you’re here and your relief evaporates. ‘Toby.’ He looks at you and you know.

‘Shit,’ you say. 

‘Yeah,’ he says.

‘And he’s not going to –?’

Leo shakes his head. ‘He can’t. Sixty-seven senators, Toby. Sixty-seven of them. And that’s with two abstentions.’ 

‘Shit.’ Shit. _Shit_. ‘So I’ve got to –’ 

Leo winces. ‘Yeah.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘This is not your fault. You couldn’t have known they would make an end-run around us like this.’

‘Yeah,’ but your heart’s not in it. 

‘CJ okay?’ Leo says like he doesn’t know.

‘I’m not the person to ask right now, Leo.’ 

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Leo says, rolling his eyes, weary, paternal. ‘Don’t do that, Toby.’

‘Don’t do what?’ you say like you don’t know. He sighs and glares at you as he stands and gathers his papers.

‘All I’m saying, don’t let this be Andy all over again,’ Leo says. He has every right; he was there the first time and he bore the brunt of your awfulness for weeks and he didn’t fire you and you owe him for that. 

‘It’s not,’ you say, and you realize it’s true. ‘She’s not.’ Because when Andy walked out what was left of your partnership went with her. You and Andy, you razed each other to the ground. But CJ’s not out for destruction. CJ wants to build, and she wants to do it with you. And you walked away. ‘She’s not,’ you say again, and Leo nods slowly like you’re a dim child who needs some coaching. 

And you want to say all that to her, you want to say it now, but now you have to go tell her to – ‘Shit.’ 

‘Yeah,’ says Leo. ‘I would do it, Toby, for all the world I would, but –’ Yeah. He has to go, whatever, hold the world together with string and bobby pins, whatever it is they do in the Sit Room. 

So you go to tell the smartest woman you know, the woman of the greatest personal integrity you have ever encountered, your best self, the woman you abandoned by the river because you were too stupid to see that she was right and hurting like you but right anyway – you go off to tell her to betray herself to a room full of cameras and steno pads. 

You find her in her office, and when she sees you her face falls. 

‘I’m so sorry,’ you begin, as you never have before. As you think Leo might. And you mean it. ‘This whole thing was a cock-up from start to finish and I’m not the least to blame and I’m sorry, CJ.’ 

And then you tell her to go and betray herself.

She looks like she wants to hit you, and she probably should. But there she goes to do her job. At the pleasure of, et cetera. You watch her go and wonder when you’ll get a chance to say to her, ‘Yes, okay, yes, let’s go, let’s do it, let’s be us together and let’s build.’ 

You watch her go. You walked away; you deserve this.

*

You take the podium and you make it yours and you shake your hair from your eyes and you say it. 

You feel like spitting through your teeth but you don’t. You feel out the room and you make it yours. Chris and Danny and Steve ask you things that burn your heart; Chris’s eyes are hot and dangerous and Danny looks like he knows you’re bleeding out and he wants to stanch the wound and knows he can’t and Steve just looks like he’s calculating column inches. 

But this is your room, and you take it.

 _Yes_ , you say calmly like you mean it, _this is a compromise_ , and _no, this does not represent a shift in this administration’s policy on reproductive rights_ , you say over the track in your mind that’s screaming your betrayal of yourself over and over at you. As though you don’t know perfectly well that your boss could with a stamp and a pen build a wall to protect you and every other woman in the country from this, and when you get the question that would let you speak your own true private opinion you don’t hesitate for a moment to do your job. You throw the roughly hundred and fifty million women of the United States under the bus with a joke about how _unfortunately laws are made not in my office by fiat but in the United States legislature by consensus_ as you betray yourself and them, all hundred and fifty million of them, and you wonder what the First Lady will say and who will ask you to hand-hold her and will it be him? Him again and always him? And the bile rises in your throat but you hold your podium and the room and you do your job. _Partial-birth abortion_ , that’s the lie you’ve been ordered to speak, pretending you think there is such a thing; it’s like a gag rule of one, and how apt, because you think you’re about to puke. But you don’t.

You serve at the pleasure of the President. It makes you want to scream.

But you don’t have anyone to scream at just now so you leave the room to the shouts of your name and you gather your things and you snap at Carol for no reason, and then you turn around and hug her because you’re sorry and she’s one woman you can do something for against the millions you can’t. She forgives you; she always forgives you. You don’t deserve that.

And you have to go on to the next thing, there’s always a next thing, so you fume all the way to Andrews and when you drop into your seat on the plane you’re almost in tears and when he shows up standing in front of you nervous and quiet like you’re supposed to care what he’s feeling you nearly lose it right there. 

But he drops into the seat next to yours and he’s quiet for a long time, until he takes your hand in his and says, ‘You were incredible in there.’

It’s supposed to be an apology.

‘Fuck you,’ you say. To his credit, he just nods. 

‘Yeah.’ He sits silently with you. The jets roar. 

The President passes. He hesitates; he turns. ‘CJ,’ he says. ‘Thank you. Thank you, and I’m sorry.’ He, Jed Bartlet, is sorry. He, the President of the United States, has done his job today. You are not in the mood to make the distinction. You take a hard look at the line and you brush away your tears and you cross it.

‘Don’t apologize to me, Mr. President. This isn't about me, it's about one hundred and fifty million American women and you should not be apologizing, you should be exercising the fullest reach of your executive power and – excuse me, sir, but don’t you dare apologize to me. You just signed a law that denies me personhood. And you can’t apologize to a non-person.’ He goes red with shame or anger or both; you don't know or care. The muscles of his tense-set jaw twitch. He nods curtly and walks away and you wonder if you just lost your job and you decide you don’t care.

All the while, Toby is still next to you and still, remarkably, holding your hand.

‘You’re a brave girl, Claudia Jean,’ he says. A bathetic joke but good god, does he mean it. And you smile and sob at once. He looks at you. You have all his attention. ‘I mean it. You really are amazingly brave. You are also right.’ He pauses and sighs. You can’t stop crying. ‘For what it’s worth, I really am sorry.’ You think he means: for this and for everything. He looks at you until you look at him. He squeezes your hand. ‘And for what it’s worth, I really do care for you tremendously.’ You shift your weight toward him, just a little, as Air Force One makes a slow turn onto the runway.

You sniffle and sigh and you begin to draw yourself together. ‘Toby,’ you say carefully, ‘do you still have that crossbow?’

He barks a laugh. ‘The Secret Service wouldn’t let me on the plane with it, once they found out it was for you.’ 

You smile at last as the plane picks up speed. ‘Scared of me, are they?’ 

‘Terrified. And they’re not the only ones.’ 

‘Thanks, Toby,’ you say. 

‘You, too,’ he says. He means what you did: for this; for everything.

Wheels up, and you press his hand to your cheek, and you’re grateful for his presence, how he fulfills you with his presence. And you glance out the window and you laugh, because Air Force One is flying into the sunset.

*


End file.
